Had a lovely allotment lunch today, a salad only containing things we grew on the plot. I went last night and got salad leaves, beetroot and broad beans and added some new potatoes, an egg and our cucumber. With a homemade honey and mustard dressing it was flipping lovely!
…As our regular reader(s?) will know it’s been a while since the last update on here, very nearly a month in fact. We’ve not been managing to get down to the plot as much as we would like this summer for a variety of reasons, the last two weekends before this one felt like we had hardly done anything. We tried to change that this weekend and we have got a few days booked off at the end of the week to hit the plot again (and make them both look nicer for the allotment competition judge who will be coming round soon!)
Since the last update we have decided to try and put a better path down 118, it currently has just a black membrane down and frankly looks a bit rubbish. It doesn’t help we’ve been piling weeds on there to dry out in the sun so it looked a mess and really needed sorting. To that end I have been scavaging a few flags (17 at the last count) which have been an absolute pain to move around, I had no idea how heavy they were. I set to work laying a few of those this weekend whilst Pilla bravely tackled weeding the whole of 118. It’s a huge plot but Pilla is very efficient with the hoe and managed to get the lot done. We both weeded the front after that and the plot looks way better for it.
We now have a nice new sign on the front of the plot from the Society – the dreaded ‘Hosepipe Ban’ sign. Our plots are pretty close to taps and we don’t really water that much outside of the greenhouse so hopefully it shouldn’t effect us too much. We did feel sorry for the people who have to walk down past a few plots to get to a tap. In the heat that is not a fun job! We really have noticed the lack of rain, the ground is very dry, but it’s doesn’t look like our plants are suffering too much at the moment.
We spent the few hours we had on Sunday on the plot sorting the greenhouse. It was really packed with chilli, sweet pepper and aubergine plants to the extent you couldn’t really get in there. This is not great for a variety of reasons not least that the fruits in there need light to ripen. This was a much bigger job than we thought, we pulled out all the Jalapeno, Cayenne, Padron, Sweet, Marconi, Chili, Twilight, Black Pearl and Habanero Peppers – we must have 4 or 5 of each. Most of them needed staking and some we decided to give away, but once they got a good watering they got placed back in the greenhouse with a lot more room and hopefully a lot more light.
We have been taking loads of produce off the plot. We must have had about 2 kilo’s of strawberries so far, including this rather interesting looking fella. I’m not sure if we should have censored it or not! Alongside the mountains of strawberries have been getting an almost equal amount of raspberries. Seeing how many we got this year, I’m not sure we needed to buy the second variety we got earlier in the year, next year we’ll be swamped! We’ve also had (in no order) turnips, cauliflowers, carrots, courgettes and cucumbers (you really forget how many of these you get. It’s madne, ss), potatoes, red currants, blackberries and more lettuce than we could possibly eat. Ace.
To say sorry again I’ve made a video on what Plot 97 has done this year. You lucky things.
You know it’s summer when you have your first strawberries, when you can can a BBQ without it raining and when the England football team are playing badly – all three of which happened on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon at the allotment was great, we celebrated the nice weather with our first allotment bbq – featuring our own produce and some homemade burgers from home – delicious! Before we could tuck into that we did have some work to do. Pilla planted out the courgettes across both plots and weeded a fair bit of plot 118.
I spent a while in the greenhouse attaching the tomatoes to their supports, it doesn’t seem that long ago we planted them on but a couple had go so big they had toppled over a bit. On Sunday we had another move about in the greenhouse, taking down the staging at the side of the greenhouse so we could spread the peppers and tomatoes out and attached the tomato supports to the greenhouse.
After the great weather on Saturday, the forecast was a bit more dodgy today. We managed to get a fair bit done though, Pilla had a good weed on the side of plot 97 and I planted out our cabbages over on plot 118. We had a good weed around there too, covering the onion bed and generally all over as the soil had quite a lot of little weed seedlings growing. The good news was the that rain overnight seemed to have given the beetroots some life, we were complaining two weeks ago they hadn’t germinated well, we planted some more (which have all now germinated too) and lo and behold we turn up today and there are tons of little seedlings. We’ll probably have hundreds of beetroots now! The lettuces are looking great, we’ve been taking loads off them lately (they have provided three lunches and lots of side salads with tea this week) and they are still massive.
One salad that didn’t grow well was the red spinach, it seemed to go straight from seedling to seed head, it was the fastest bolting thing we’ve ever grown. We dug it up today and replanted, I’ve read something on the Internet (which I don’t really believe, but anyway) that plants are more likely to go to seed as the days are getting longer, has the days shorted the risk recedes. We’ll see how that goes.
Due to the Manchester 10km and Edinburgh marathon over the last two weekends we haven’t been spending a lot of time on the plots and have had even less time to update the blog. We’ve made up for the former by having a four day weekend of allotmenting and I’ve taken a lot of pictures to get a good update done.
Two weeks ago we moved the munty frame from 97 to 118 – there is a lot more room there and it held up very well in the move. We’ve planted out about twice as many runner beans as we did last year, with a new variety that’s a cross between a runner and a french bean and as such is less stringy. We got these out just after the last frost which caught a few people out (including killing the top leaves of our potatoes), and the beans seem to be doing pretty well, hopefully there won’t be another frost. This weekend we quickly hardened off the sweetcorn for a few nights and planted them out in front of the runner beans.
After the AGM on Sunday we bought four Brussel sprout seedlings as out of a whole tray of our own seeds only three germinates and we have only two viable plants. Considering just one of us eats sprouts I think two plants would be more than enough but it just didn’t feel like enough. Still, at 30p a seedling we hardly broke the bank! Next up was planting out some sugar snap peas, dwarf french beans, climbing french beans and peas. To do this we had to create something for them all to climb up – the dwarf french beans and peas need support up to about waist high, the climbing beans and sugar snaps need something considerably higher. I designed a totally unique structure (absolutley nothing like the bean structure on Bob’s plot, it’s not even close*) and put it right next to the nets I made for the sprouts (the netting is also nothing like the net structure just next to it on Bob’s plot. Totally different*) and Pilla planted out the seedlings and sowed a few extra peas in the holes for good measure. We then did a fair bit of weeding over the plot as the warm and wet weather over the last week seemed to have really brought out the weeds, they are growing quicker than everything else! We also planted a line of sunflowers in front of the beans and gave the onions and broad beans a liquid feed – we have some concerns about how fertile the soil is on this bit of the plot and neither the onions or broad beans look particularly healthy.
We spent a lot of time potting on plants in the greenhouse throughout the weekend as we had lots of plants busting to move into bigger pots. We potted on all of our tomatoes into their final pots, along with the padron and black pearl chilli’s, marconi and new ace peppers and the aubergines (moneymaker). I took down some of the staging to make room for the plants in their bigger pots – I took the staging down but left the ‘deck’ and legs in two large pieces which I then attached the side of the greenhouse. This keeps them out of the way and should mean it’s really quick to put up the staging again in the spring.
We did a general weed on plot 97, although there really wasn’t that many to take out. Pilla did some successional sowing of lettuces in a free bed, something that we weren’t very good at last year and vowed to improve upon this time around. On Sunday we thinned enough of the many lettuces we have to make a tasty salad for tea. Pilla also sowed another batch of parsnips and a few beetroot as the germination rate on the new plot has been really disappointing which we think might be a sign that the soil fertility is in need of some help . We had tons of beetroot last year (some of which won a prize at the summer show) so only having a few will be a real shame.
Elsewhere on plot 97 things are looking pretty good – we have lots of blackberry flowers across the whole length of the bush, it’s quite amazing that this was a tiny little plant this time last year. We have loads of little strawberries growing and in the same bed the raspberry canes are covered in fruits that are not quite ripe, flowers which results in frequent visits from many bees. The scabiosa plant has survived the winter and now has it’s first very pretty flower. Happily we only have a few days of work this week before we can get back to the plot!
* Ok, I ‘borrowed’ the design from Bob!
Another long day at the allotment. We got there bright and early to find two gifts – a bottle of homemade banana and apricot wine from Chris (thanks Chris!) and Bob had rotavated all of the ground that we had turned over last week (thanks Bob!). This was a huge job giving us lots more usable space and must have taken ages because the soil was rock solid. – the soil looks perfect for planting in now. I tried on a section I had turned over on Saturday and whilst Iwas struggling with the rotavator Pilla was busy feeding and watering the garlic and shallots on plot 97.
We made a quick call in to the stores to buy netting and canes (you can never have enough canes it seems) and also returned with a massive amount of wire fencing, which should easily be enough to cover the full side and the back of our plot. After lunch I used hoops to make the tunnel covering the cauliflowers and red cabbage, while Pilla sowed a couple of rows of swedes. Hopefully this should protect them from attack better than last year as the mesh on this netting is much finer.
Back on plot 97 we planted out our sweetpeas across the front and up the bamboo arch and filled up their place in the cold frame with the runner beans and purple sprouting broccoli. I did some more weeding on plot 118 and Pilla planted out kale (dwarf green curled), savoy cabbages (tarvoy) and sweetcorn (sweet nugget and mini-pop, a mini variety from Bob) in the greenhouse and a few more lettuce varieties out in the plots. We also potted on some of remaining chilli plants.
Our first fruit shouldn’t be too long away now, the strawberry flowers will soon turn to fruit and the red current bushes already have little green berries on-exciting!
Final day of the long weekend and we still had plenty of jobs we wanted to accomplish. Having spent most of the last two days on plot 118 we needed to spend some time in the greenhouse on plot 97. There were a few things that needed potting on, having outgrown their seed trays. Neil constructed the rest of the staging to give us some extra space to spread out. We then potted on some marigolds, tomatoes, sunflowers and cucumbers. The latter are not strictly supposed to be transplanted once they have been sown but when you don’t know how many will germinate it would use far too much space to put four or more in large pots. We just made sure we were really careful not to damage their roots!
We then did some more sowing, almost nearing the end of our pile of seeds for this year. I planted three varieties of carrot (Flakkee, Flyaway and Ingot) into one of our clear beds. Carrots were a sore spot for us last year as they were pretty much the only thing we planted that didn’t work out. We used a series of pots but they went from looking quite healthy and bushy to having roots that were a mushy mess. We never established the reason for this, whether it was too much/too little water or some form of blight or insect. Rather than repeat our mistakes we decided to try a different tactic and put them straight into a bed. Considering our parsnips were successful and pretty straight we used the next bed along and sowed neat rows, fingers crossed for some seedlings.
We then returned to plot 118 and made some huge progress. Neil did some neat painting of the fence and got halfway along before rain stopped play (I’m sure the lifting of the paint lid is the allotment equivalent of a rain dance!). He then used some membrane we got from Bob (thanks Bob!) to cover the last big patch of grass and weeds between our large mound of soil and Debbie’s fence. Even if it doesn’t diminish the weeds it makes it look a lot neater for the time being.
We then tackled a job that wasn’t even on our list! Bob has kindly offered us the use of his rotavator next week to loosen the large area just behind the fence. It was pretty full of weeds and because it had been so long since it was turned over it was really hard and dry on the surface. The rotavator will do most of the work but we needed to get it started and also remove some of the deeper rooted weeds so we don’t chop them up and spread them further. It was a really good job to do as it made us feel like we have achieved a lot and certainly makes much more of the plot look like it is being worked effectively. I christened Neil the manic depressive gardener as after a brief visit on Friday he was feeling quite down and anxious about all that we had to get done yet by this afternoon he was grinning from ear to ear at how far we had progressed! Let’s hope the highs continue!
Recent Comments